


the sins of the fathers

by metafictionally



Category: Block B
Genre: F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-11-21
Updated: 2014-11-21
Packaged: 2018-02-26 12:22:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,003
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2651900
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/metafictionally/pseuds/metafictionally
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>like a sentence of death, I got no options left<br/>I've got nothing to show now<br/>I'm down on the ground, I've got seconds to live<br/>and you can't go now<br/>'cause love like an invisible bullet shot me down<br/>and I'm bleeding, yeah, I'm bleeding<br/>and if you go, furious angels<br/>will bring you back to me</p>
            </blockquote>





	the sins of the fathers

**Author's Note:**

> this might take me eight years to finish

Jiho starts his day by shooting someone in the teeth, which is how he knows that his day is going to suck.

Over the last three years, Jiho has learned to qualify days into three categories: Good days, just days, and bad days. Good days are the ones where everyone listens to him, no one dies, and he doesn’t have to clean blood off his shoes. These days are rare. Just days are the normal kind—messes are made and Jiho has to clean them up, but he doesn’t lose any men and, for the most part, everything goes as planned.

Bad days, such as the day that Jiho’s having today, are the kind where he starts his morning by shooting someone in the teeth and it all goes downhill from there. At least the guy has the courtesy to fall backward instead of forward—grey matter is such a bitch to clean out.

“Anyone else wanna talk about it?” he says, pointing his gun lazily between the two remaining assholes breathing his air. “I have all the time in the world.”

That’s not true, because he actually has a meeting with the manager of Club Phoenix in an hour and a half, and he has to get back to HQ and changes his fucking shoes before he can go do any kind of business. But the dramatics have the intended effect—the goons glance at each other and take off running, back toward Jaehyo’s side of the playground.

Jiho sighs and re-holsters his gun. Behind him, Kyung sucks in air through his teeth and says, “You okay?”

“Yeah.” Well, relatively. “It’s gonna be a shitty day, though. Remind me, what’d Hong say he wanted, when he called about the meeting?”

“He said he didn’t want to say it on the phone.” 

Another thing Jiho has learned: When someone doesn’t want to say it on the phone, that usually means bad news. “Thrilled,” he mutters, glancing down at the body on the pavement in front of him. Blood pools under the guy’s head, oozing into the cracks in the sidewalk and spreading out. “Get somebody out here to put this guy in the river,” he says, nudging the corpse’s shin with his toe. “I’ll let Jaehyo know.”

“He’s not gonna be happy,” Kyung says, though Jiho knows he’s already texting the order over.

“He’s never happy,” Jiho says. 

That’s not true either. Jiho remembers a time when Jaehyo was happy. But that was a long time ago, in another lifetime. Things are different now. 

“You know, Kyung,” Jiho says thoughtfully, “I’m really sick of these assholes coming into our territory and messing stuff up. You know?”

“Yeah, I know.” Kyung slings an arm around Jiho’s shoulders and casually messes up his hair. “Let’s go,” he says, with a best friend’s talent for leaving unsaid the things that should be left that way. “It makes me look bad when my boss shows up for meetings covered in who the fuck knows.”

“You’re fired,” Jiho says, finally letting himself smile.

 

The message reads `Wasted another of your cronies. He’ll turn up in the harbor in a few days`, and Jaehyo doesn’t need to see the familiar Z at the bottom to know who it’s from. He gets texts like these once a month or so, when Jiho puts a bullet in another of Jaehyo’s men. It happens more frequently than Jaehyo is totally comfortable with, but he knows that his men on Jiho’s territory makes _Jiho_ uncomfortable, so he keeps making it happen, and the messages keep coming. It’s really the only way they talk these days, anyway.

“Hey, boss.” Minhyuk glances up from his own cell when Jaehyo slams his hand palm-down on the table. “What’s up?”

“Jiho offed another of my soldiers,” Jaehyo says. “Again.”

Minhyuk huffs a laugh-that’s-not-really. He’s not the type to like shooting things up, people included—it’s half of why Jaehyo likes him so much, actually. Minhyuk grounds him. “I see. Tell me, how bad do you need eyes on the inside of that meeting at Club Phoenix?”

“Like on a scale of one to ten? Eighty. Are you offering?”

“Would you send anyone else?” 

He has a point. Minhyuk is the best they have in terms of recon—Jaehyo’s not about to send some wet-behind-the-ears newbie to handle a situation like this. Plus, just because Minhyuk doesn’t like shooting shit doesn’t mean he’s not damn good at it, if need be. “I want you in there ten minutes before it starts and back here ten minutes after it ends,” he says, flicking his lighter open. “Any longer and I’m gonna assume you’re dead.”

From the corner of his eye, Jaehyo can see the way Minhyuk’s glance flicks between Jaehyo’s face and the lighter in Jaehyo’s hand, but he doesn’t comment. Self-preservation, probably. “Sure thing,” Minhyuk says after a moment. “See you in a few hours.”

“Rather walking than in a body bag.”

Minhyuk just waves over his shoulder and disappears to go get ready. Jaehyo flicks his lighter closed and picks up his cell phone again, the text from Jiho still displayed all over the screen. It’s offensively bright. Jaehyo wants to delete it, pretend it didn’t happen (pretend they still know how to talk in ways that don’t involve murder and arson), but he has to send something back or he’ll lose face, and in a game where reputation is everything, Jaehyo can’t afford that.

He sends back, `Charmed to know I can’t escape you even when I change my number`, and finally deletes the conversation when Jiho responds with a photo of his shoes, splattered with blood and whatever else, and a caption reading `Out, out, damned spot.`

This was never what he wanted.

Jaehyo flips his lighter open again and catches the edge of a report on fire, watching as it blackens and curls into delicate flakes of ash. One of these days he’s going to set fire to Jiho’s corpse, he thinks. Hopefully he won’t regret it.

 

The meeting with Hong goes, as predicted, awfully. He opens the meeting by telling Jiho that Jaehyo’s offered him twice the protection for half the cost, and while he doesn’t phrase it like a threat, that’s how Jiho takes it. Yukwon can tell, even if Hong can’t, because he’s spent the last four years learning the way that Jiho spins coins on tabletops when things don’t go his way.

`Twenty thousand says he wastes the bastard,` Kyung texts him midway through the discussion. From his perpetual position at Jiho’s right hand, he’s been giving Yukwon periodic updates—mostly in case they need Yukwon’s firepower, but also partly because Kyung thinks it’s fucking hilarious how Hong doesn’t seem to realize he’s walking right into the Tiger’s mouth. 

`Nah`, Yukwon types out. `Probably scare the piss out of him and give him a chance to think about it, then waste him if he doesn’t agree.`

He sends the text, pockets his phone, and then presses the muzzle of his gun against the skull of the guy lurking in the shadows of the club balcony. “Hi,” he says, lifting the guy’s firearm from where it had been tucked into the back of his pants. “You’re in a really wrong place at a really wrong time.”

“Tell me about it,” the guy says. To his credit, he doesn’t bolt. Yukwon’s kind of glad—if he’d run, there would’ve been a bullet in his back, and that’s just a pain in the ass for everyone involved. “But you’re not going to kill me or you would have done it already.”

“Who says?” Yukwon clicks the safety off. “Maybe I just like playing with my prey.”

The guy turns around and meets Yukwon’s eyes, letting the gun press against his cheek without even flinching. Yukwon recognizes him—Lee Minhyuk, the closest thing to a second-in-command that Jaehyo has. Rumored to be pretty sane, for someone who plays on the Ahn side of the fence, and privately Yukwon thinks he’s pretty cute, in the dark and silent kind of way. Shame he’s enemy property. Bigger shame that killing him would bring Jaehyo’s fury down on all of them, and Yukwon’s not suicidal.

“I know your type,” Minhyuk says, giving Yukwon a quick once-over. “You’re cute on the outside, but if you want someone dead they’d be stone cold before they knew what hit them. And I know you know there’s no way I could have heard anything worthwhile from up here.”

That much is true. Still, it pisses Yukwon off to have this stranger talking like he knows him. “I’m flattered you think I’m cute,” he says, letting the gun trail along Minhyuk’s cheekbone and down to press into the soft underside of his jaw. “But if I see your face around here again I’ll put a bullet through your eye. Okay?”

The corner of Minhyuk’s mouth quirks, just slightly, like he knows he’s won. “Okay,” he agrees. “Nice meeting you, Kim Yukwon.”

Yukwon runs his tongue along his teeth and presses up close to Minhyuk, reaching around to put Minhyuk’s gun back where he’d found it. “Wish I could say the same for you,” he says. “You shouldn’t keep your gun back here, you know. Could shoot yourself in the ass, and where would we be then, hmm?”

Minhyuk smiles. “Wanna know a secret?” he says. “It’s not loaded.”

Against his better judgment, Yukwon returns the grin, intrigued even if he refuses to admit it. So Lee Minhyuk is just as enigmatic as the rumors made him seem. “Get out of here before I make you show me why,” he says, gesturing with his gun in the direction of the exit and pulling a face at Minhyuk’s back as he walks away. 

When he checks his phone, Kyung’s sent him another text. `Remind me never to bet against you,` it says, and Yukwon laughs.

 

Jaehyo isn’t impressed when Minhyuk tells him that Hong and Jiho talked about nothing they didn’t already know, and Minhyuk can’t really blame him. After all, Jaehyo’s been searching for the cracks in Jiho’s defense for ages, the one little slip-up that could bring down the entire Woo operation—and he hasn’t found it, because what Jiho lacks in organization he makes up for by being smart as hell and clever on top of it. Jaehyo’s been trying for years to break him down.

“And,” Minhyuk concludes, “he has Kim Yukwon doing his recon detail. Now you know why so many of your scouts keep turning up dead.”

“Kim fucking Yukwon,” Jaehyo says, rubbing his fingers against a charred mark on the tabletop. “That’s a lot more work for you. I don’t trust anybody else to go against him.”

Minhyuk shrugs. “I know how he works,” he says. “I let him catch me.”

“You did _what?_ ” Jaehyo’s lighter clatters against the table. He looks like he can’t decide whether to laugh at Minhyuk or eviscerate him on the spot. “What the fuck were you thinking? I said I wanted you back _walking_ , usually that doesn’t mean you should go flirt with the Grim Reaper!”

“Just proving a point,” Minhyuk says. “He does what he does well, but he doesn’t like it. I don’t think he wants to shoot people any more than people want to be shot.” 

Yukwon had been sure of his grip, yeah, but there was a split second of hesitation before he flicked the safety off. Insignificant to most people, but when you play the game Minhyuk plays—and the game Yukwon plays, where they’re pawns on Jiho and Jaehyo’s chessboard—a split second of hesitation can be life-or-death. If Yukwon had wanted Minhyuk dead, he’d be a corpse right now.

“You’re lucky I like you,” Jaehyo says. “Suicidal bastard.” He flicks his lighter open and lights it, then flips the lid closed, smothering the flame. “Send Taeil in on your way out, if you can find him.”

“Sure.” 

Minhyuk pauses at the door, glances back over his shoulder at Jaehyo. “Boss,” he says. “Are you okay?”

If looks could kill, Minhyuk would be ashes. “I’m great. Fantastic,” Jaehyo says, rolling his eyes. “Go away, Minhyuk.”

“All right,” Minhyuk says, and goes.

 

“So how’d the thing with Hong end?” Yukwon asks Jiho later that evening, stretched out shamelessly atop Jiho’s sheets. Jiho’s sitting naked on the edge of the bed, flipping through a stapled sheaf of paper—probably profiles on Jaehyo’s higher ups, judging by the photos attached. “Kyung stopped texting me updates around the time you threatened to break his fingers.”

“That’s about how it ended,” Jiho says absently. “Threatened his fingers, his eyes and his balls and then let him think about it. We’re going back next week.” He flips another piece of paper and pauses. “What do you know about Lee Minhyuk?”

“Me?” Yukwon shifts, running a hand absently over his stomach. “He’s as close to Jaehyo as anyone is, and good at what he does. The street gangs like to talk about his kill ratio... Apparently he’s never had a hit escape.”

“Huh.”

Yukwon sits up and scoots over, pressing himself against Jiho’s back so he can look over Jiho’s shoulder. “And he’s cute,” he says, tucking his chin into the crook of Jiho’s neck and reaching down to tap the photo. “Good with a knife. That’s basically all I look for in a man.”

Jiho laughs, reaching up to ruffle Yukwon’s hair. “You’re a dumbass.”

“I have great taste.”

“Am I supposed to be flattered?”

“Yeah, actually,” Yukwon says. It’s not far from the truth—he talks big, but Yukwon’s only slept with three people, Jiho included, since he joined up with Jiho and his men four years ago. “You should be honored. There should probably be tears, and professions of gratitude.”

“Don’t hold your breath, you’ll die first,” Jiho says, but the teasing does what it was meant to—he drops the papers next to the bed and pushes Yukwon back down onto the mattress, looking down at him with the kind of intent Yukwon likes.

Afterwards, much later, Jiho falls asleep with one hand on his gun and his head on Yukwon’s stomach, and that’s how they are when Kyung comes into the room. “How long ago did he pass out?” Kyung asks quietly, settling into the chair next to Jiho’s bed.

“Ten, twenty minutes,” Yukwon replies. “He’s pretty fucked out, he’s not gonna wake up for us talking.”

“On a scale of one to nuclear, how pissed is he still?”

“He’s not pissed,” Yukwon says, shrugging and running his fingers through Jiho’s hair. “Just stressed.”

“The teeth marks in your shoulder say otherwise,” Kyung replies, raising an eyebrow. “But if you mean he’s not pissed _anymore_... good. Jihoon just picked up some asshole sneaking around the building, looking for a way in, and the last thing we need is Jiho giving him the third degree while he’s angry.”

Jiho does hate having to clean blood up. It always stains, no matter what. “You think we can get anything out of a lowlife like that?” Yukwon asks.

Kyung shrugs. “Probably not, but even lowlifes know how to listen. We take what we can get at this point.”

“Thinking Jaehyo’s up to something?”

“Jaehyo’s always up to something,” Kyung says. “But we’ve capped more of his goons on our side of Seoul in the last four months than we have in the last four years put together, and I dunno if you can tell but it’s starting to wear on Jiho’s patience.”

“I can tell.” Yukwon rubs absently at the imprint of Jiho’s teeth in his shoulder. “Any idea why?”

“Why he’s pissed or why Jaehyo’s doing it?” With a deep sigh, Kyung stands up and picks Jiho’s papers up off the floor, setting them on the table instead. “Nevermind. Either way, I can’t tell you—no offense intended, Kwonnie.”

“None taken,” Yukwon says. He’s never been unsure of his place—he knows exactly what he is to Jiho and exactly what he is to the family, and he knows that Kyung is irreplaceable in a way he’ll never be. It doesn’t bother him—he’s useful in his own ways, after all, like letting Jiho come home and throw him into walls and leave bruises on his hips when they fuck their aggression out. Kyung can’t do that for Jiho. “I’ll send him your way when he wakes up.” 

“You do that,” Kyung says, and gives Jiho a complicated, heavy look before he leaves.

 

Jaehyo remembers a good day: Years ago, more than a decade, before he was the Black Dragon of Seoul, when he’d spent the day at the beach with Jiho (not yet Zico, not yet the Red Tiger), digging tiny crabs out of the surf and burying each other in the sand. It seems like it was forever ago that they were kids, so long ago Jaehyo’s not even sure if half of his memories are real.

That day, Jiho had braided Jaehyo’s hair into tiny plaits and painted stripes on his own cheeks with sunblock. “Permanent war paint,” he had explained, sprawling out on the sand, tanned gold and glorious. He had been fourteen then, on the verge of growing into his limbs, and Jaehyo had been sixteen, most of the way through growing into his. 

“You’ll look like a moron when it tans,” Jaehyo pointed out, stretching out on the sand next to Jiho and propping his head up on one hand. 

Jiho had scratched his stomach, cracked an eye open, and regarded Jaehyo with the kind of calm self-assurance he’d always had. “You’ll still like me,” he said decisively. “Even if I have a war paint tan.”

“Yeah, I guess so,” Jaehyo had agreed.

And then, somehow, Jiho had reached up and pulled Jaehyo down by the collar of his shirt and kissed him, lips rough with salt and sunburn, and Jaehyo hadn’t pulled away. They were sixteen and fourteen, silly teenagers, doing things like this because there was no one to tell them no.

But then Jaehyo had gone away to learn how to be the Black Dragon, and everything was different after that.

 

Yukwon gets unlucky exactly once, when he’s flirting with the borderline and finds himself a few blocks too deep into Ahn territory. The lackeys are on him before he can draw his gun, and Yukwon takes a fist to the mouth and a knee to the stomach—they strip him of the pistol holstered at his hip and force him down onto his knees, tilting his head back with a hand fisted in his hair. This is annoying. Yukwon is probably going to catch hell for this from Jiho when he gets back, and he’s probably not going to be in the mood.

“Getting a little confident?” one of the lackeys asks—the one who doesn’t currently have his fingertips digging into Yukwon’s scalp. “Thinking you could just stroll in here and take the place over?”

Yukwon grins and spits blood on the ground. “If it were that easy we would have done it years ago,” he says. “Are you gonna give me my gun back?”

“I think we’d better send Woo Jiho a message,” the lackey says, like he hadn’t even heard Yukwon talk. “Maybe give him a chance to fish one of his out of the river instead. Turnabout’s fair play, right?” He grins down at Yukwon, mocking, and fishes his cell phone out of his pocket. “Remind me of your name, sweetheart. So he knows whose corpse to look for.”

“Aw,” Yukwon says, pushing his lower lip out in a pout. “You got me all roughed up and you don’t even know my name? And here I thought we had something special.” He laughs, flexing his shoulders a little. “My name’s Kim Yukwon. Spell it right.”

It’s always a little funny, to watch the exact moment that some underling realizes exactly what a mistake they’ve made. Yukwon may not like his reputation, per se, but he knows he deserves it—he is a damn good assassin, has never missed, and is faster than most people know how to look for. Jiho likes him for a reason, and those reason do not go unspoken in the whispers underneath the streets. The lackey’s thumbs pause on his computer screen, and Yukwon watches him swallow hard, just once. “Kim Yukwon,” he repeats.

“That’s me,” Yukwon says, and takes advantage of the lapse in concentration to gently, almost fondly, slice the achilles tendon of the man holding him captive.

In the ensuing commotion, Yukwon tucks his knife away and retrieves his gun from where the man had dropped it in his haste to clutch his hands to his ankle. “Thanks,” he says, touching his split lip and looking at his fingers when they come away bloody. “Now I have a good excuse for being late reporting in. Have a nice day.”

He leaves them alive, because Yukwon doesn’t like to kill people unless he has to, and walks back toward Jiho’s headquarters. It isn’t a long walk to the borderline, and there he pauses. “If you keep following me you’re gonna find yourself in a world of hurt,” he says, turning back to look at Lee Minhyuk. “You’re not a very good tracker, you know.”

“I wasn’t trying to be stealthy,” Minhyuk says, stepping out of the shade of the building he’d been lingering next to. “You haven’t noticed any of the other times, have you?”

From the tilt of his smile alone Yukwon can’t tell if Minhyuk is joking, so he just shrugs a little and fingers the grip of his gun. “I’m really not in the mood to shoot anybody right now,” he says. “Just as fair warning.”

“Conveniently, I’m not really in the mood to be shot.” Minhyuk offers both hands, palms-up. “You’re an interesting guy, Kim Yukwon. One of the deadliest assassins in Seoul, but contracted to work for a guy who only stays in power because his lack of planning makes him unpredictable. You laugh at guys with their knives at your throat, and then leave them alive because—what, you’re not in the mood to shoot anybody?” Minhyuk lifts a shoulder, then drops it. “Next you’ll tell me you’re actually a pacifist.”

“I am a pacifist,” Yukwon says. “What’s your point?”

“My point is, I think you and I are a lot more alike than you would think,” Minhyuk says. For all that his smile is still light and shallow, there’s something serious in his eyes, a hardness that Yukwon wouldn’t know to look for except that he knows it’s in his eyes too. “Think on that for a while.”

Against his better judgment, Yukwon is intrigued. Chances are pretty damn high that Minhyuk is trying to play him for a fool, that much is obvious—Minhyuk didn’t work his way to Ahn Jaehyo’s right hand by being an idiot. But the suggestion is enticing to parts of Yukwon he thought he had killed and buried a long time ago. “So what are you saying?” he asks, lifting an eyebrow at Minhyuk. “That we’d work better together than we do separately?”

“Something like that,” Minhyuk says. He takes a couple of steps forward—not enough to be threatening, although the motion does make Yukwon’s grip tighten on his gun. “I’m saying that if I’m right, then you don’t really like this killing business as much as you like people to think you do. And that makes us similar.”

It’s a little terrifying, because it’s true.

Instinctively, Yukwon schools his features into a careful mask of distant interest, shrugging. “I guess you don’t really know much about me after all,” he says. “Shame.”

Minhyuk looks at him for a long moment, then shrugs. “Suit yourself,” he says. “But if you change your mind, I’ll be at the fountain in Yeouido park on Sunday, noon. If you’re interested, show up. If not, I’ll have my answer.”


End file.
